A stuttered journey of self-discovery in everyday anarchy. Mid-twenties. Indian Computer Programmer in America

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It’s the talk of the town now – an hour and a half after news started spreading that Osama Bin Laden was killed in a firefight in Abbottabad, Pakistan (Abbottabad is sixty kilometers away from Islamabad, capital of Pakistan). A headache the day after another hiking trip (saved for later) meant I stayed away from the television or computer for most of the day, and only came to know about this development when my entire Facebook newsfeed homepage was filled with status updates about the bloody end to a man with a bloody legacy. I tuned in just in time to see President Obama address the nation about the incident. He let us know that US intelligence got a lead on him a whole year earlier.

He wasn’t found in the rugged, tough and inaccessible tribal belt by the Afghanistan-Pakistan border unlike what we’ve been lead to believe all these years – he was found in the heart of Pakistan, in a suburb of the capital of the country, Islamabad. I find this quite suspicious and might point to some sort of support from powerful elements in Pakistan because it is obviously hard for a man of such notoriety and recognizable face to escape attention from people around under normal circumstances within an urban setting.

This development is going to count as one of Obama’s big achievements and will certainly raise his stock in the days ahead. Had this happened closer to the elections, Obama would have hugely benefited from the immediate positive flow in his favor.

What needs to be taken care of now, is to protect anything that violent extremists that support Osama see as a target from reprisal attacks.

People are joking around about how Obama killed Osama. If anyone missed this on FOX News last night, there was a Freudian slip by the newsreader when he said “President Obama …telling the nation and the world .. President Obama in in fact dead…” . It’s already up on YouTube:

Islam-A-phobia is the buzzword that’s flying around these days. In the media, in restaurant discussions, heck, even in my university portal, discussions constantly put Islam under trial in a negative sense.

Most of it has to do with Islam having something to do with violence. Blaming Islam, perhaps out of naivity, ignorance, or even deliberately defaming it to clear the way and further their own ideologies.

Blaming Islam because some Muslim violent extremists interpreted it in a certain way, not agreed to by the rest of the 99.9% Muslims, and only agreed to by the likes featured on http://www.loonwatch.com.

Blaming Islam because a handful of violent extremists who happen to be Muslim, are working on their political struggles. You never saw this happen with Catholicism when the IRA was active in Ireland. Nor with Hinduism when the LTTE was active in Srilanka.

While it has been universally seen in all such forums of discussions that the saner voices of moderation and understanding, are in the majority, the likes of Fox blasting away anti-Islamic right wing propaganda and hatred still hurts.

But, the media, as someone recently said, is a biatch – it doesn’t necessarily portray the popular sentiment. It seeks to mould public sentiment according to the individual ideologies of those who own them.